Matt Bean

Vice President of Product Development, Rodale

Bean largely contributes to digital strategy at Rodale, in addition to creating and maintaining relationships with partners like Apple, Adobe, MSN, YouTube, Google and more.

Rodale’s vice president of product development Matt Bean explains his role as a mix of several components, including readying the company for expansion and acting as an evangelist for new platforms. Undoubtedly, Rodale’s digital blueprint occupies much of Bean’s attentions.

“As digital grew in importance, and the news business as a whole embraced new platforms, my job transitioned from covering the next big thing to trying to help us develop a strategy around it,” says Bean. “Now, I focus on developing and maintaining our partnerships with companies such as Apple, Adobe, MSN, YouTube, Google and more.”

When the Apple Newsstand launched in 2011, Bean says Rodale’s mission became clear, “We needed to re-platform our digital magazine editions away from the home-grown solution that allowed us to be first-to-market, and onto a more sustainable, long-term solution. We needed something that could help us reach customers across multiple screen sizes, resolutions, devices and more.”

Due to company scale, Bean explains that Rodale “has to be smart about placing bets,” but says decisions like moving to Flipboard are paying off in audience numbers. He says the publisher is close to passing half a million readers across its brand portfolio.

“We’ll start monetizing soon, and I think our leadership in novel spaces like curated content helps to position us for new and exciting opportunities,” Bean tells FOLIO:.

2012 is shaping up to be another noteworthy year for Rodale. Bean says the publisher is creating two YouTube channels for Google’s new premium content initiative. With this project comes an ambitious goal, considering the realities of today’s Web environment, “I think everyone is eager to see how we can shift users on YouTube from trolling for cats, lasers and the like to more substantial, meaningful content,” says Bean.

VITAL STATS: The publisher is poised to pass over 500,000 active users across Rodale’s brand portfolio.